The Interledger Summit

Briana Marbury

President & CEO

Interledger Foundation

Briana is passionate about promoting open payments and financial interoperability solutions for the world's population that need it most. As President & CEO of the Interledger Foundation, her goal is to expand the public’s awareness of the Interledger Protocol's immense potential to improve lives.

State of Interledger

We'll take a look back at the origins of the Interledger Protocol, where the ecosystem is today, and the illuminous future we're looking forward to.

Stefan Thomas

CEO

Coil

Open-source developer and distributed systems advocate. Currently working to create a better business model for the Web.

Introducing Dassie: An Interledger Peer-to-peer Network

For the past several years, Interledger has been used very effectively among a small group of early adopters. However, it wasn't possible for many developers to gain access to the network due to the difficulty of peering with an existing participant. In this talk, Stefan announces Dassie, a new open-source project which combines Interledger and peer-to-peer technology to dramatically lower the barrier to entry for developers looking to experiment with or build on ILP.

Arunjay Katakam

Digital Finance Advisor

UNCDF

Arunjay Katakam is a former EY consultant who has co-founded three startups, one of which eventually sold to Twitter. He works with the likes of the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the GSMA and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase financial inclusion through mobile money payments and digital public infrastructure. Arunjay mentored over 20 inclusive fintech startups with DFS Lab and was a venture builder with Catalyst Fund. He diligently advocates for a zero-fee customer payment model in his book, The Power of Micro Money Transfers.

An Open Regulated Global Payment Inter-Network

The infrastructure to achieve total interoperability already exists to a great extent but needs to be better harnessed. By creating an open regulated global payments inter-network, leveraging and cultivating existing infrastructure, any regulated service provider will be able to send money to anyone, anywhere in the inter-network, speeding up total interoper­ability, reducing the cost of transactions, and providing migrants with an easy and efficient way to digitally transfer money to their home countries.

Erin Brown

Performance Lead

USAID

Erin Brown is the Team Leader for the Management Performance Strengthening Team in the Management Bureau’s Office of Management Policy, Budget and Operational Performance. Before that she launched USAID’s new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) agenda as the Agency’s Acting Chief DEIA Officer in the Office of the Administrator, including development of its 2021 DEIA Strategic Plan and an Equity Action Plan that highlights the Agency’s key actions to address equity across its programs and partnerships. A strategy and organizational transformation subject matter expert with 23 years of experience in the public and private sectors, Ms. Brown joined the United States Agency for International Development in 2012 as a Franklin Fellow after 13 years in the private sector where she led medium and large-scale strategic planning, business process improvement, and organizational change management initiatives for defense and civilian government agencies. Prior to joining USAID, Ms. Brown was a Senior Principal at the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, where she led the Building Effective Organizations Practice in the Federal Sector.

The 5Ps of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a hot topic across multiple industries and sectors, especially since the untimely death of George Floyd in 2020. While strategies, tools, and techniques to drive development of inclusive financial systems is the focus of the Interledger Summit, is that goal possible without a strong focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion by actors in the financial inclusion space across all aspects of their operations? In this talk, you will hear from Erin Brown, former Acting Chief Diversity Officer at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as she discusses the 5 Ps of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and how she used a focus on the 5 Ps of DEI to build USAID's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) program. Through these 5Ps, you will gain awareness as to how our ability to achieve equity and financial inclusion may not be possible until that same focus and intention is used to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion within our own organizations (i.e., it starts at home). Erin will also cover a few foundational strategies to level up on our DEI efforts so that it both benefits our organizations internally and improved our ability to promote greater financial equity and inclusion outcomes.

Paula Hunter

Executive Director

Mojaloop Foundation

Paula Hunter is the Executive Director of the Mojaloop Foundation – a charitable nonprofit organization focused on extending the financial inclusion efforts of the Mojaloop open source software project. She leads the organization’s strategic planning and direction; grant, membership and strategic partnership development; and evangelism for the organization and its mission. Ms. Hunter is an open source and technology leader with nearly two decades of executive director-level experience managing industry advocacy groups, open source organizations, and standards associations.

Making Digital Payments Affordable and Simple for Everyone, Everywhere

While mobile money services exist in nearly 100 countries, 1.4 billion people still lack access to digital financial services, despite most owning a mobile phone, according to the World Bank's Global Findex. By providing a model for how to simplify and reduce the cost of designing interoperability between individual payment services, countries working with the banks, and mobile money and digital payment providers can develop connected instant payment systems that meet the digital financial services needs of emerging markets - especially the financially excluded. Built upon the Interledger Protocol, Mojaloop is an open source platform for helping hub operators with instant payments clearing. Mojaloop's API protocol does more than just move money: the software helps network participants to interact robustly with each other, helping to bring some financial inclusion principles to life. Mojaloop is reliant on its community of supporters, contributors, evangelists, developers, and others to make its work possible and help achieve the Foundation’s mission of providing universal financial inclusion to all. This session will go into detail about Mojaloop’s work with Interledger’s Rafiki API work and the need to upgrade to Interledger v4.

Michael Richards

Financial Services Principal

ModusBox

Michael Richards is the rapporteur of the Mojaloop Change Control Board, chair of the Mojaloop Design Authority and Mojaloop’s representative on the ISO 20022 standards group. He is deeply involved in the definition of extensions to Mojaloop functionality. These currently focus on improvements to the settlement process, on support for currency conversion and on opening Mojaloop schemes to cross-border payments.

Making Digital Payments Affordable and Simple for Everyone, Everywhere

While mobile money services exist in nearly 100 countries, 1.4 billion people still lack access to digital financial services, despite most owning a mobile phone, according to the World Bank's Global Findex. By providing a model for how to simplify and reduce the cost of designing interoperability between individual payment services, countries working with the banks, and mobile money and digital payment providers can develop connected instant payment systems that meet the digital financial services needs of emerging markets - especially the financially excluded. Built upon the Interledger Protocol, Mojaloop is an open source platform for helping hub operators with instant payments clearing. Mojaloop's API protocol does more than just move money: the software helps network participants to interact robustly with each other, helping to bring some financial inclusion principles to life. Mojaloop is reliant on its community of supporters, contributors, evangelists, developers, and others to make its work possible and help achieve the Foundation’s mission of providing universal financial inclusion to all. This session will go into detail about Mojaloop’s work with Interledger’s Rafiki API work and the need to upgrade to Interledger v4.

Adrian Hope-Bailie

CEO

Fynbos

Adrian is a co-inventor of the Interledger Protocol stack and the Open Payments standards and payment pointers. He is a co-founder of Fynbos where he is building the first account that will issue payment pointers and support Open Payments.

Payment pointers - the universal payment instrument

An overview of payment pointers and open payments and how these will create an open and inclusive application layer on the Internet of Value

Sabine Schaller

Research & Development Lead

Coil

Sabine has always been interested in Data Ownership and the Internet of Value. She works on the specification and implementation of open standards like the Interledger Protocol, Open Payments, and Web Monetization to allow for a Web where content can be paid for with hard currency instead of data. Prior to joining Coil, Sabine co-founded Registree, a privacy-preserving recruitment platform. She holds a degree in Statistics and Mathematical Finance.

Meet your new friend - Rafiki

Rafiki is a software package that bundles Interledger infrastructure with the powerful accounting database Tigerbeetle and the Open Payments APIs to send money programmatically. And that is just what first meets the eye. Rafiki has a bunch of hidden qualities, which this session will formally introduce and show off during a live demo.